Rick Spielman says Vikings can handle Percy Harvin

After an eventful week with Percy Harvn, Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman is confident that everything will be fine.

Spielman said on 1500 ESPN that despite Harvin saying he was unhappy in Minnesota, the team’s perspective is that it can work with talented players, even unhappy ones.

“There’s different personalities that you have to deal with on a daily basis, but when you look at Percy, what he brings to us on the field, how much passion he has to play football, he gives us a great opportunity to win on Sundays when he’s on the field,” Spielman said. “We try to know and understand when we draft a player, sign a player as a free agent, or bring a player into our organization, how we’re going to have to handle this player. Is he going to be handled differently? What do we have to do differently to handle a player? Those are a lot of pre-discussions that we have before we bring players in. And you just have to have a game plan if a guy has an issue or something and then try to work off that.”

Spielman said that in his talks with Harvin’s agent and head coach Leslie Frazier’s talks with Harvin, the team has made it clear that Harvin won’t be traded and will be in the team’s plans going forward.

“I know coach Frazier really met and sat and talked a lot with Percy. I dealt more with the business side of it and dealt with his agent, Joel Segal,” Spielman said. “As far as I know, the last dialogue I had, we’re expecting Percy to be at training camp and ready to go.”

It’s still not completely clear why Harvin suddenly declared himself unhappy in Minnesota last week, but from all indications the Vikings dealt with the issue as well as they could and got Harvin on board with the team’s plans. Harvin has an unpredictable enough personality that no one can say for sure he’ll be happy in Minnesota, but it appears as sure as anything can be that he will play in Minnesota.

The carnival has left town and now there are professional people in charge. I have a lot of respect for Frazier, Spielman, and Wilf. This kind of thing is going to be dealt with quickly before it becomes too much of a distraction.